2025's best songs (so far)

All Songs Considered

NPR

Music

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 July 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

This week we share our wildly incomplete list of the year's best tracks so far, including bangers from PinkPantheress and HAIM, a slow-burner from Lana Del Rey, dystopian rap from clipping and more.

Featured artists and songs:
1. PinkPantheress: "Stateside," from 'Fancy That'
2. HAIM: "Relationships," from 'I quit'
3. clipping.: "Keep Pushing," from 'Dead Channel Sky'
4. Lana Del Rey: "Henry, come on" (single)
5. Oklou: "Blade Bird," from 'choke enough'
6. Miya Folick: "This Time Around," from 'Erotica Veronica'
7. Perfume Genius: "It's A Mirror," from 'Glory'
8. FKA twigs: "Room Of Fools," from 'EUSEXUA'
9. Lucius: "Gold Rush," from 'Lucius'

'All Songs Considered' 25th anniversary segment: Our No. 1 songs from 2018

Weekly reset: Summer afternoon at the pool

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You know, Stephen Thompson and I were talking on a recent show about how impossible it is to keep up with everything that's coming out.
0:06.5	This is something, you guys, you experience this, right? Don't you?
0:10.0	No, I keep up with everything.
0:11.9	Yeah, Hazel doesn't. Yeah, Hazel is on top of everything.
0:14.4	Yeah, I actually know everything that's coming out.
0:17.3	And I just come to her and she just tells me.
0:20.4	No, it's hard. It's really hard to keep it up.
0:22.9	It is. With everything. Sheldon, that's like that joke. Between me and Hazel, we know everything.
0:27.9	And if I ask you something, you say, that's one that Hazel knows. Yeah. Yeah, that's when you've got to ask her about. But otherwise, between the two of us, yeah, we know everything.
0:48.0	Well, one of the small ways that we try to make sense of it all, you know, sort of whittled down that impossibly long list of releases is by hitting pause on everything around the mid-year point.
0:53.5	You know, we pool our collective brain power, which is quite something.
0:54.7	I mean, it's sizable.
0:55.2	Yeah.
0:55.5	Right?
0:55.9	Yeah.
0:57.8	This is like, this is big time stuff.
0:59.3	It's definitely more than nothing.
1:00.6	I can guarantee that.
1:02.5	Okay.
1:04.5	Not by much.
1:10.6	But what we end up doing is we come up with this absurdly incomplete list of the year's best songs so far. And that's what we're
1:12.8	doing this week on the show. We all brought stuff that, you know, we've still got in
	...

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